One of my followers recently posed this question: “how can you effectively target the promotion and sales of luxury goods?”
Whilst marketing something that everyone uses every day might sound like an easier task than marketing a luxury, non-essential item, I would argue that it’s the other way around. Being able to identify a specific niche market typically makes the job a lot easier.
If you’re selling a luxury good or service, it may only be the top 10 to 20 per cent of the population that can afford to buy from you, however this percentage still represents a significant opportunity.
Being able to narrow an audience down to a specific market is, in fact, easier as the audience will have a very distinct set of behaviours that you can learn and use to your advantage.
Firstly, you need to become an expert on your customer, learning everything you can about them: how they live, what they eat, where they frequent, the cars they drive, what they read, how often they consume media and what media they consume, how do they behave, what industries do they work in and so on.
A lot of this information can be found from researching online. Utilise yours and your competitor’s social media pages to build a profile of your customers. You can also search online to find data on which income brackets are most prominent in different locations, the average incomes of different occupations and where these high-income earners work as well as live.
Spend the time to get intimate with your audience and understand their pain points – what are the problems they experience that you can address. Understand their motives for purchasing and the messages that will resonate with them. You might find that your target audience reads the Australian Financial Review or The Australian every day. If they’re doctors however, they may not have time to read AFR every day, but instead consume medical publications to stay on top of new information (at least, one hopes they do!).
Once you’ve identified who your audience are, where they are, what media they consume and what messages will speak to them and address their unique pain points, you can begin to structure a campaign from there.
If they’re on social media, start there. If, as per the above example, they are only consuming medical publications, it may be worth taking out an advertisement in a prominent medical journal or newsletter. See my other posts or get in touch for more details on how to build a campaign around your audience.
Something else you may want to consider when providing a luxury product or service, is the UX – User Experience Design, or the process of interacting with the product or service. No matter your current offering, there is almost always room for improvement. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and imagine yourself going through each step of the process that one would go through to interact with your business. From your website to your answering machine message, the time it takes you to respond or the packaging of the product when it arrives on someone’s doorstep. Work out where you can inject ‘luxury’ into the details. Did the product arrive in a perfectly ribbon-wrapped box with a card verifying the authenticity and quality of the product? Did the service include answering the phone consistently, remembering your name or offering to take your coat when you arrived?
Make the experience as premium as the offering itself and see how your business shifts. You might see more word-of-mouth referrals, or you may be able to showcase this premium experience on your social channels.
I hope this has given you some food for thought!
Stay Dangerous,
Kevin Spiteri
